Carola Dibbell - The Only Ones

Yes, Rini. They’re still alive.

Sometimes she just wants to change her mind about who will get what child. She was the only one who thought they will all be born.

And to tell the truth, just before Christmas, the one called Berthe died. Nobody even knew why.

She was ten weeks in.

Rini wanted to come down from Toronto but Rauden said what is the point? He put what is left of Berthe in the freezer.

So there were three left. And none of them were mine. Henry went to Quarryville. He had a job. It snowed.

I missed Berthe. Man! I cried. Rauden says it is the hormones. When Rini asked me how I feel, I cried. Why would I miss Berthe?

Twelve weeks in.

Maybe it was Ani I missed. She was still alive. But she wasn’t mine any more, because she had to replace Berthe. To tell the truth, I never took it serious, will Ani be mine. I didn’t even know what it meant.

On New Year’s Eve, Delmore heard horses and we shut the rec room door and Henry stayed with me in the room quiet as a mouse while Rauden waited upstairs with a shotgun.

False alarm.

There is also a false alarm about Mumbai hitting Ottawa, where Rini had gone for a meeting, but it took weeks till they figured it out and all that time she’s stuck in quarantine.

In Macau, it’s real. Mumbai took half the city.

Rauden rigged up a TV Signal to the monitor so we could follow the News. Taipei too. Then a big jump and Mumbai took out what’s left of Luzon.

Rini kept calling from Ottawa because what else is she going to do from quarantine? I told her Ani, Chi-Chi, and Madhur are still alive, but she wants to know how I am. I said I’m tired. She said put Rauden on.

He yelled at her. “Rini! She doesn’t want the goddamn child!” And he is right.

What am I going to do with a kid, the life I live?

I watched Ani very careful though. She moved. Sixteen weeks in.

Sometimes I thought about how it worked with Rini. How first she wanted gene-for-gene Madhur. Then Rauden talked her into my soma and her mitochondria. But when Rauden got viables from just me, she wanted them. Even the regular way, how it used to work, maybe you end up with a kid you didn’t plan. You changed your mind.

When Rini called, I told her Ani moved. She wants to hear about Madhur. I told her Madhur moved too. Chi-Chi too.

Between you and me though, Ani moved the best.

They are swinging on their, you know, the cord. They all got one and Rauden says how useful the cord is if you remember to save it, but nobody does. Ani did the swinging first. But now they’re all swinging. I showed Rauden. Is it regular? He looked it up and said it is. “No need to tell Rini, though.”

It snowed again.

It’s not a false alarm in Seattle, Washington. Two hundred cases confirmed. So it hit Mainland. But back in India, where it began, is worst. It hit all over again. It spread every direction.

Nineteen weeks in.

She was a little smaller than%js,s g my hand. They all were.

Cases in Chicago.

It snowed and rained. Rained and snowed. I had a really deep sleep and when I woke up, Chi-Chi was dead in the tank.

Rini drove the hybrocar straight down from Toronto which took four days with border problems and the weather. When she got to the Farm she strode into the rec room like a big curtain, walked up to the window, and scratched her cheek till blood dripped on her clothes. It dripped on the floor. She tore her clothes. She began to walk up and down the rec room, holding up her bloody hands and making a noise. It was awful.

Rauden went upstairs. When he came down, he was drunk. “Get her out of here,” he said.

They hooked up my heartbeat loop and I went with Rini for drives. It was almost five months since I even went outdoors. We looked at scenery. It was cold and wet. When we got back to the Farm she was raving and moaning again.

It was like, when she looked at the ones who were still alive, she just saw the ones who weren’t. She seemed to get nervous looking at Ani and Madhur. Maybe she was thinking of Berthe and Lily. Maybe the original Madhur. Maybe the sisters.

They had heartbeats.

Rauden was drunk. He kept drinking even after Rini finally left. He was even popping pills. He was cold and sweating all the time. If you accidentally touched him, you would want to wash your hands, that’s how slimy he was from cold and sweat. Even Janet Delize was concerned, because if Rauden went off the deep end, the whole thing wouldn’t work. Sometimes he was totally out to lunch. I had to remind him to check the IV bags. I don’t know who had the idea, set him to work cloning again. I think it was Henry, calling from Albany. Henry said, give him a Project. That will keep him sober.

There were still viables in the freezers, twelve eggs from my Port Jervis Harvest and a lot of frozen soma. He had trouble getting it to work at first. That worked almost better — he had to be totally sober to concentrate. He tried conventional IVF with male solos twice. That never worked. He had to try two times before the nuclear Transfer worked. Then he got eight working viables, split those to multiples of four, and when it’s all done, thirty-two new viables went in cryoPaks upstairs.

Well, maybe you wonder, wait a minute. Thirty-two viables, just made to keep Rauden sober? How ethical is that? And by the way, what’s going to happen to them? Maybe they are not me, or Ani, or Madhur, but face it, they will be at least a little similar, right? Don’t I care if they are ever born? Well, I’m going to get back to you on that.

For now, those viables are in the freezers, and I’m in the rec room. Ani and Madhur are in the tank, twenty-two weeks in, and Ani is blinking. I wasn’t feeling so great. Generally it is Rini who calls to say, “Did Inez have her milk Process? Did she have nourishment?” Now she’s forgetting to call. Rauden is getting on my nerves. He can’t give up this toxin business. Nobody ever did a full-term study of the Compatibility anomaly. What if there is a late-term toxin that is going to kill me now? I am like, oh shut up, Rauden. All the things I been exposed to in my life, and I am going to die from Ani and Madhur who are not even born?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because Ani died in the tank at twenty-six weeks. So Madhur was the only one.

When Rini got the news, she drove down to the Farm and stared at Madhur for a long time, and everyone is worried, here we go with the cheeks but she did not even have fresh blood, just scabs from Chi-Chi. She took my face in her hands that. I tell you that.t been all the 9H. She did not scratch my cheeks. She just looked down at me. Then she unhooked me, took my hand, and we went upstairs to tell Rauden he could only freeze a small piece of what was left of Ani, and she would take it with her. It belonged to her. We burnt the rest, to ashes. We had a ceremony in the woods. Even Rauden went. He seemed really nervous. He wasn’t drunk though. Lucas came back to keep an eye on Madhur and the tank.

Rini took me for a long drive when the ceremony was over, to a hilltop where there was an old farm, or used to be a farm, which was burnt. We got out and walked around and we threw Ani’s ashes in the wind. It was starting to be spring now, but windy. Rini’s skirts and veils were flapping hard. She was ash-white; her lips were practically purple. There were large black shadows and hollows around her eyes. Her hair was dirty.

She turned to me, in the wind. “You must promise me,” she said, and she had to shout for me to hear, “if something happens to me, you will take the child.”

“What could happen?” I shouted back. But, to tell the truth, I could think of things. She looked like death.

“You must promise!”

“Rauden—”

“Rauden would sell the child! Promise!”